New Geography

Category: Demographics

  • Cities, Children and the Future

    By Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill

    “Suburbs,” the great urbanist Jane Jacobs once wrote, “must be a difficult place to raise children.” Yet, as one historian notes, had Jacobs turned as much attention to suburbs as she did to her beloved Greenwich Village, she would have discovered that suburbs possessed their own considerable appeal, particularly for those with children.

    Although some still hold onto the idea that suburbs are bad places to raise children, in virtually every region of the country, families with children are far more likely to live in suburbs than in cities. Nearly all the leading locations in percentages of married couples are suburbs, from Midwestern towns like O’Fallon, Missouri to Sugarland, Texas, Naperville, Illinois and Highlands Ranch, Colorado.

    In contrast, many of the places with the lowest percentages of children are urban centers. This includes many of the most highly touted urban cores such as Manhattan, Boston, Portland, Seattle and San Francisco.

    This is particularly true among more affluent, middle class, educated family households. Despite the rise in the number of children in a few affluent locales, such as the upper east side of Manhattan, most middle class families tend to cluster outside the city core. Even in Manhattan the number of kids falls considerably below the national average after the age of five.

    So the question remains: are families important to the planners, developers and politicians who run our cities? Veteran geographer Dick Morrill wonders if they do. He sees many cities turning their backs on working and middle class families, long the ballast of urban society throughout the ages.

    Instead, many city planners, and urban developers have focused their attention on the growing ranks of the unattached: the “young and restless,” the “creative class,” and the so-called “yuspie” – the young urban single professional. These advocates suggest that companies and cities should capture this segment, described by one as “the dream demographic.”

    The other coveted urban demographic centers on the so-called “empty nester,” largely boomers who have already raised families. Developers, like luxury homebuilder Robert Toll, see a vast movement of such people from the suburbs to the inner city. “We are more hip-hop and happening than our parents,” he explains. “We want the sophistication and joy and music that comes with city dwelling, and doesn’t come with sitting in the burbs watching the day go by…”

    Yet although this strategy might work for a handful of cities, childless urbanism may have its limits. There is, for example, little evidence that many empty nesters — outside of the very rich — are moving en masse to center cities. The vast majority seem to be staying put in the suburbs while a considerable group heads further out into the periphery and beyond.

    This leaves the key demographic for cities to remain viable: the young and educated, one group that has shown a tendency to move into center cities. But there’s a problem with relying of ‘yuspies” in the long run — they get older and grow up. Right now, as Philadelphia’s Paul Levy suggests, most young couples leave once they start having children. If cities are to hold on to this population, he suggests, they must address the basics important to families, such as public safety, good schools and parks.

    This issue will become even more pressing in the next few years. As the current and very large millennial generation ages, they will begin to dominate the housing market. From all accounts, they tend to be family oriented. More than 80 percent thought getting married would make them happy, and some 77 percent said they definitely or probably would want children, while less than twelve percent said they likely would not.

    If cities cannot change to appeal to these young people once they enter their 30s and 40s, they will be hard-pressed to maintain, much less expand, the population gains made over the past decade. Once the Millennials are gone, the next generation of young people seems certain to be considerably smaller.

    In this sense, the Millennials represent the future hope for cities. The need to shift the focus beyond the denser downtowns and towards many outlying neighborhoods will become a necessity. These places — think of Queens in New York, South St. Louis or parts of the northwest Philadelphia — may see less glamorous and more “plain vanilla” than city centers but they already possess some of the basic prerequisites needed by family: relatively low density, work areas nearby, neighborhood shopping streets, churches, schools and parks.

    What will happen to the least child-friendly cities over the next generation? Imagine a city with fewer total residences, inhabited by fewer people, although with a significant increase in “luxury” dwellings. In the new urban landscape, high-rise towers for the rich predominate, some of them in refurbished office buildings that formerly employed the middle class. These now become the homes of the “creative class” and the nomadic rich.

    This is a city whose funds come largely from the global economy, but whose needs are cared for largely by low-wage workers who eke out their existence in the city, and reside in outlying areas. Ultimately, such a bifurcated society may limit the economic functions that can be carried out in these places. A small cadre of operatives, including the CEO and some senior staff, may remain ensconced in the glamour zone but companies dependent on a broader array of talent will continue to relocate to less exclusive places, either to the suburbs or to different regions.

    Such pressures have already helped Houston to replace New York and Los Angeles as the nation’s energy capital. In the future a place like Charlotte will continue its emergence and its drive for financial dominance. Charlotte, suggests local real estate developer, John Harris, can compete against an expensive metropolitan region not only at the top levels of management, but across the board. “It’s hard to be a mass employer in San Francisco,” he notes.

    In the end, the elite childless city can be seen as both the culmination of urban development and as a demographic dead end. Unable to lift up outsiders and absorb newcomers, these cities may be able to thrive as high end business hubs and elite playgrounds. But they seem unlikely to absorb more than a trickle of those Americans who may want to move into dense urban places over the coming decades. Instead, this cohort may look to those towns ready and still willing to accommodate families.

    Joel Kotkin is the executive editor of Newgeography.com.

  • New Urbanist Cities, Class and Children

    The United States has experienced a revolutionary change in social structure over the last 25 years, and this in turn has led to a significant change in settlement, especially the geography of many metropolitan areas.

    At the risk of over-generalization, our society has shifted from a structure based on economic class to one based more on education and social values. The major parties confusedly reflect these changes. One astounding feature of our society is that wealth inequality has returned, not just to the levels of 1928, but even to 1913, and yet there is almost no sense of outrage as a basis for the mobilization of the relative have-nots (this helps explain the peculiarity of the 2008 elections).

    Over this period, or somewhat longer, there has also been a deepening division of the population on what I’ll call the nature of educational outcomes. I used the word astounding above, and I’ll use it again to denote the scary inequality in factual knowledge and reasoning capacity of people, despite rising official levels of attainment. So there really is (as Rove et. al argued) an “intelligentsia” or intellectual elite. The hallmarks of this new “class” is higher education, environmentalism, liberalism or tolerance on social and cultural difference (religion, race, sexual preferences, etc) but also surprising affluence – almost what the word “liberal” meant in 19th and early 20th century Britain.

    In my sphere of urban geography and planning, these characteristics have led to a surprising consensus on a “New Urbanist” vision (very popular word) – a return to a lost golden age, pre-suburb and pre-automobile, and in fact ghastly for most people. The movement began back in the 1960s (anti-sprawl, anti-suburb, anti-car, pro urban village) and came to dominate intellectual thought on city form and planning practice by the 1980s, and has certainly been given extra impetus by the “peak oil” crisis following 2001.

    The urban geographic manifestation of this social and intellectual change has taken place through a revitalization and transformation of selected central cities, especially those with major universities.

    This has taken three main forms: first, gentrification (displacement of poor and minority families by more educated and affluent professionals), but including idealist students and empty-nesters (returning from the suburbs); second, redevelopment or “densification” through large-scale rezoning from single-family home and low-rise arterial businesses, to multi-story apartments (from row houses to high towers); especially in designated major urban centers, which, third, will be linked to the downtown by rail transit.

    While this movement has not, in fact, slowed the pace of suburban and exurban growth, even in cities where New Urbanist planning prevails, it has significantly altered several core urban cityscapes and concurrently, the social and economic structure of these cities. Typically lower and middle class families and minorities have been displaced out of the core, often to older suburbs, and been replaced by larger numbers of singles, or childless couples and empty nesters, many educated professionals. The shift of housing stock from single-family homes to apartments (rental or condo) is unattractive to many families, and often unaffordable, as higher density and parking constraints raise land and housing prices. The New Urbanist city is not childless of course, but relatively so, as many families are displaced or flee from the overpriced city.

    We next look at how New Urbanist visions have played out in a small sample of cities, by first comparing a few core cities which have pursued such planning with a few that have not, then compare the more New Urbanist cities with their suburbs, and finally look at how the New Urbanist cities have changed since 1990. I’ll conclude with some thoughts on what this means to the nature of people and place. Is the New Urbanist city the ideal future in a post-oil world, or a failed social experiment?

    Table 1 shows selected 2006 characteristics of four cities which are more affected by New Urbanist planning—Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Boston and of three cities which have been less transformed: Dallas, Houston and Phoenix (but which have otherwise grown rapidly).

    Portland and Seattle more recently pursued New Urbanist goals, and San Francisco and Boston more indirectly and long-term, while Dallas, Houston and Phoenix are more market-driven. It’s pretty amazing that Seattle matches or even exceeds San Francisco as the least familial, with traditional families constituting less than one-fifth of households, and children under 15 making up less than 13 percent of the population. In contrast Dallas, and Phoenix have almost twice as high a share of families with children under the age of 15.

    Much higher shares of households are non-family (singles, or childless couples or unmarried partners) in the New Urbanist cities. Social, economic and housing characteristics differ markedly as well. Levels of educational attainment and of professional and managerial occupations are much higher, median house values are much higher and levels of commuting by single-occupant vehicles much lower.

    Portland is less “advanced” on New Urbanist measures, even commuting by SOV?, although it has strong planning, rail transit, and started much earlier than Seattle. The main difference seems to be the much higher share of single-family homes (60 percent) in Portland than in Seattle (48), and a less constraining urban growth boundary.

    Table 2 compares central city and suburban characteristics for five cities: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Dallas and Phoenix. The story is very simple. Suburban numbers for the New Urbanist cities are remarkably “normal” by U.S. metropolitan standards and are essentially like the central city and suburban values for Dallas or Phoenix. An intriguing feature of Dallas and Phoenix, compared to the New Urbanist metropolises, is that the suburbs still have higher status than the central cities (income, professional share, educational attainment). Seattle stands out, even more than San Francisco, as the only city with a higher city mean income than its suburbs. In other words, the distinctive feature of New Urbanist cities is the class shift, from gentrification and higher class redevelopment.

    Table 3 compares the 1990 and 2006 values for four cities: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Boston. It is not really a surprise that what this tells us is that these “New Urbanist” cities were already in 1990 very unlike such cities as Phoenix, Dallas or Houston. Even before the arrival of stronger New Urbanist planning tools, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Boston were rather non-familial, fairly highly educated and moderately high in transit use.

    It is true that each became a little less familial. Seattle and Portland were more affected by planning, with reduced single-family housing shares, and increased transit use. Portland grew more in population, reflecting a longer period than Seattle of planning denser urban settlement. Portland was also significantly less gentrified, in the sense of maintaining a higher share of less affluent households, although it had by far the highest housing price inflation — three times the change in the CPI (Consumer Price Index). According to critics of Portland’s planning, this is a consequence of a longer period of stronger growth controls. But Seattle, San Francisco and Boston house prices were also twice the rate of change in the CPI. Median incomes increased well above the CPI rate (U.S. 55 percent) in Seattle (100), San Francisco (95) and Boston (119), but much less in Portland (71), indicating less gentrification in the latter.

    What does all this mean? Does it matter if the New Urbanist cities are relatively childless/family unfriendly? Probably not, as there are nearby suburban jurisdictions more welcoming to families, more affordable and as rich in jobs. It is even likely that the New Urbanist planning was as much a reflection of the already “elitist” character of the cities, rather than being a cause of fundamental change. Even stranger, the New Urbanist planning seems to have responded to and pursued market preferences, although perhaps overzealously. That is, young professionals and empty nesters really wanted to live in the core and were willing to pay extra for the privilege.

    The main social cost of the transformation — in stark contrast to the stated goal of New Urbanist planning to recreate urban village communities of intense local interaction — is that real world neighborhoods with single family homes, city or suburban, with children in local schools, have a stronger sense of community in large part because of the relative permanence of home ownership.

    High density, New Urbanist core cities do encourage greater transit use, and use land more efficiently. Even if the majority of the population prefers suburban living or less dense central cities, will the end of the “age of oil” and concerns of global warming force the widespread adoption of new urbanism? I don’t think so, but that’s another story.

  • Understanding Phoenix: Not as Sprawled as You Think

    Phoenix may be one of the nation’s most misunderstood urban areas. The conventional wisdom is that Phoenix is one of the most suburbanized (or if the pejorative is preferred, “sprawling”) urban areas in the United States. Not so. According to 2000 U.S. Census data, Phoenix ranked number 10 in population density out of the 36 urban areas with more than one million in population.

    At this point it is appropriate to define terms. An urban area is an urban footprint, the area that would be outlined in lights from an airplane at night. Urban areas are also called urbanized areas or urban agglomerations. Urban areas do not include any rural territory — they are the continuously built up or developed territory. Urban areas are considerably different from metropolitan areas, a difference often missed by journalists and others. Metropolitan areas are labor markets, are defined using county or town (in the six New England states) boundaries and always include rural areas and more distant exurbs.

    The Phoenix urban area had a population density of 3,683 per square mile, with 2,907,000 residents living in 799 square miles. What may be even more surprising is that only one Eastern urban area — New York — was more dense and only one Midwestern urban area was more dense — Chicago. In the South, only the Miami urban was more dense than the Phoenix urban area. On the other hand, in the highly automobile-oriented newer West, six urban areas were more dense than Phoenix. Portland, despite local and international marketing efforts to portray that area as the ultimate example of urbanization, was not one of them. In 2000, Phoenix was nearly 10 percent more dense than Portland. As is shown below, this gap may have widened since 2000.

    All of that does not change the fact that Phoenix and its suburbs seem to stretch on forever. That is the nature of large urban areas. What makes Phoenix one of the nation’s most compact urban areas is that its population density declines from the center to the urban fringes at a much lower rate; the outer rings tend to be not much less dense than the inner city.

    This contrast can be best seen in comparison to the Boston urban area, widely perceived as one of the nation’s most dense urban areas. Nothing could be further from the truth. Central Boston, including such municipalities as Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville clearly fit this description and rank among the highest density areas in the United States outside the four highly urbanized boroughs of New York City. The densest part of the Boston urban area (in land area) has a population density of 28,000 — more than double that of Phoenix (nearly 14,000) and even more in comparison to Portland (12,000).

    But there is much more to an urban area than the urban core. The big difference is in the suburbs. Most Boston suburbs developed as low-density communities. Land restrictions, often imposed at the town and village level, are far tighter than in similarly sprawled part of the greater Boston area. Indeed, beyond the dense core and the inner suburbs, the sprawl is so extensive that the Boston urban area covers more land area than the Los Angeles urban area, which has nearly three times as much population. The outer suburbs of Boston also are slightly less compact than the outer suburbs of Atlanta — the world’s lowest density large urban area.

    Overall, the Phoenix urban area has a density that is more than 50 percent higher than that of Boston’s. A comparison of the population density profiles of the Phoenix, Portland and Boston urban areas illustrates these differences, with higher densities in Phoenix and Portland than in earlier developing, but much more suburban Boston.

    The key to the higher density of the Phoenix urban area (and other higher density urban areas of the West, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Riverside-San Bernardino, Las Vegas and Denver) has to do with the greater power of the market in newer cities. In Boston, Washington, Philadelphia and a number of other Eastern and Midwestern urban areas, suburban land use regulations required large lot zoning creating far larger urban footprints than would have occurred otherwise.

    In the Phoenix urban area, comparatively dense development continues all the way to the urban fringe — and that densification seems to be accelerating. The U.S. Bureau of the Census American Community Survey indicates that the density of the Phoenix urban area (within its 2000 definition) rose 11 percent between 2000 and 2006. This is more than double the rate of densification nationwide. Only Riverside-San Bernardino, Atlanta, Houston and Las Vegas densified at a greater rate. Further, based upon the new data, the Phoenix urban area — John McCain’s political base — is now more dense than Senator Barack Obama’s Chicago region.

    Resources:

    2000 Urban Area Data

    Comparison of Atlanta and Boston urban areas

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris since 2002. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey.

  • The Phoenix Lament (with apologies to J. K. Rowling)

    Fifty years ago, Phoenix was Tiny Town in the Desert, smaller than Oshkosh or Santa Fe today. Now, it is larger than Philadelphia and the metro area has the bulk of Arizona’s population. That does not mean it gets any respect; on the contrary, it is, to many, a joke, with all of Los Angeles’ traffic and smog but without the ocean, the celebrities or the Lakers. When it surpassed the City of Brotherly Love, Pennsylvania newspaper columnists waspishly described the Valley of the Sun as ‘‘a loose accumulation of crummy vinyl-sided houses occupied by sunburned retirees who happen to share a zip code.”

    They went on to note that “Phoenix has no downtown. . .and neighborhoods? None to speak of… [it] doesn’t rate as an actual city. . .it’s more like a place where a lot of people happen to live. Phoenix would kill to have a walkable city the way we do.’’ More recently, an anonymous commentator in The Economist reported that crime and other social ills were turning the city into an inhospitable and ungovernable mess. Time to roll up those sidewalks and move on—oh, that’s right, there are none. The worst opprobrium is generally reserved for the audacity, or insanity, of growing a city in a desert. As a blogger on the Grist site recently wrote, Phoenix is “a poster child for environmental ills.”

    Phoenix is hardly perfect, and it certainly violates most traditional urban principles. A city of over three million, it possesses virtually no corporate headquarters. In a globalized world, Phoenix seems a nonentity, with virtually no corporate financial institutions. Home to the world’s sixth largest airport, it has few direct links to the rest of that world with the exception of a handful of daily flights to Toronto, Mexico City and London. This is the same airport that closed one summer when the temperature reached 122 degrees.

    So then, why do people keep moving here? It is usually best to follow the advice of sociologist Juliet Schor and try not to start with the assumption that people are idiots. So, let’s rationally examine what keeps the place growing. The first factor is the weather. There is none. For half the year, it is warm, and for half it is hot. It rarely snows, and there are no tornadoes or hurricanes. It rains and it floods, but the water disappears by the next day.

    The ground may be hot, but it’s also securely tethered—the earthquake risk is about as high as that for ice storms. This may seem trivial, but consider that liabilities from natural catastrophic events throughout the U.S. have exceeded $300 billion since 1988, and nearly three quarters of that can be attributed to tornadoes and tropical storms. Viewed this way, lots of people live in the wrong place but Phoenix is not one of them.

    But what about the folly of living in the desert? How sustainable is that? Well, more so that you might think. A home in Minneapolis has to be heated from zero 60 degrees to maintain comfort, and must use energy for six months, 24 hours a day. A home in Phoenix needs to be cooled for less than five months, typically for 12 hours a day, in order to bring the temperature down from 110 to 80 degrees. Cooling devices are more efficient, and use less energy.

    Research undertaken by Michael Sivak shows that the most energy efficient cities, like San Diego and Miami, are coastal, although these are also among the most vulnerable to catastrophic natural events. The least efficient are cold—Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver. In addition, Phoenix and Las Vegas come in right in the middle of the pack.

    What about water? Like its neighbor Las Vegas, Phoenix loves to display fountains and other water features. The largest of these is the Tempe Town Lake, an entirely artificial recreational pond that evaporates the equivalent of five-acre feet each day. Where does this water come from? Largely from the development of agricultural land devoted to intensive irrigation, which consumes far more water per acre than suburban houses. Of course, this cannot go on forever—if nothing else, evaporation is a waste. But when water is properly priced, creating a natural incentive for conservation, it will be used more appropriately.

    And what about the fundamental criticism, namely that Phoenix is a dreadful example of sprawl? Clearly Phoenix epitomizes a large, low-density city. But sprawl also occurs when people leave the downtown and move to the suburbs, as we see, for instance, in Detroit. In Phoenix, a growing population is filling up Maricopa County; we have few of the neglected areas that are common in many Northeastern and Midwestern cities.

    Overall, the average journey to work is comparable with other American metro areas. And most important, low-density development is cheap development. Phoenix remains one of the most affordable large housing markets in the country, even after housing speculators from California took their equity and drove up costs in Arizona and other parts of the West in 2005-07. Current estimates suggest that when the dust settles, the median new house price will once again fall below $200,000.

    Sprawl is perhaps one of the easiest insults to fling at any city. It is associated with everything from the collapse of civic life to the rise of obesity. Yet in Arizona, low-density development, which involves building large number of homes on raw land, is cheap development. Sprawl clearly involves the cost of new infrastructure, but that has to be placed against the high costs of renewing infrastructure in existing urban neighborhoods, which can involve deep excavation, specialized equipment and higher risks (like the cranes that keep collapsing in New York).

    In the end, Phoenix’s growth machine succeeds in offering a commodity that people need—an affordable home. Few families want to live in small expensive apartments—many want the amenities of a low-cost house, and in Phoenix, that can mean as little as $150,000. It is easy to demand an end to sprawl, as has been tried in California and Oregon, but the result frequently is to price single family homes out of reach for most households. In a society that offers little to its working and middle class in terms of necessities like health care, it seems uncaring to demand an end to affordable single family housing as well.

    Phoenix and its desert neighbors do not match up to the 19th century city. They lack the grand rail termini, the city halls, the cathedrals and the parks. The grandeur of the modernist era does not extend to these experiments in low-density private space—malls, office parks, homeowner associations. Yet they succeed brilliantly as bastions of successful low-cost development for middle class families. In the future they can also serve as laboratories for alternative energy usage, water recycling and, in time, more efficient transportation. The challenge is to let them change on their own terms, not make a vain effort to reconstitute them along the lines of older cities like New York, Chicago and Paris.

    Andrew Kirby is the editor of the interdisciplinary Elsevier journal “Cities.”This is his 20th year as a resident of Arizona.

  • Phoenix: Is John McCain’s Hometown Down for the Count?

    By Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill

    Much has been said about the rootlessness of our two Presidential aspirants, but both men have spent their political lifetimes representing real places and specific constituencies. Newgeography.com has already looked into the realities shaping Senator Barack Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago. Now we turn to the city that has most shaped Senator John McCain’s career: Phoenix.

    In many ways, Phoenix today is what Chicago was in its earlier days: a rambunctious entrepreneurial town subject to sometimes wild swings in its real estate market. This has led some outsiders to predict that the city — known for its sprawling development — is now destined for a long-term decline, a notion that economist Elliot Pollack heartily rejects in his article for us.

    The current decline scenarios for Phoenix echo the “death of suburbia” mantra so eagerly adopted by much of the media and academia since the mortgage crisis and the steep rise in gas prices. A particularly wistful thought in the Great Lakes Region — Obama’s putative home base — is that lack of water will force wayward Midwesterns out of places like Phoenix and back up North where they belong.

    This is nothing new. Phoenix, as Pollack notes, has been down before, as recently as the early 1990s — and to quote the old Rodney Dangerfield line doesn’t “get much respect.” Indeed the entire Phoenician ethos has something to do with poking the folks back east (and sometimes us mild weather weenies here in California) in the eye. There’s a maverick, “you can knock me down but never knock me out,” quality that Senator McCain would no doubt relate to but this sentiment is more epitomized by the city’s greatest political figure, the late Senator Barry Goldwater.

    To many easterners, Phoenix has never been considered a respectable place to build a city. Arizona, to U.S. Senator Benjamin Wade, was “just like hell, all it lacks is water and good society.” Phoenix’s city fathers included “Jack” Swilling, an often inebriated Confederate Army deserter -turned -promoter, and a sturdy group of Mormon farmers, who shared Swilling’s outsider status, if not his taste for alcohol.

    Like Los Angeles, in Phoenix the Second World War accelerated the development of new technology and business service firms. Initially, the desire to base more production further from potentially vulnerable sites on the coasts brought several thousand skilled engineers and scientists to the area. However, later, the city itself — its low-density lifestyle, its brilliant sunshine, its lack of social constraints — brought waves of high-technology firms to the region.

    By the turn of the century, the city not only ranked among America’s fastest growing cities, but also as one of the most attractive to burgeoning high technology and business service firms. In its development pattern, Phoenix essentially followed the model of Los Angeles, but without the beaches, Hollywood or Caltech.

    Like its Californian counterpart, Phoenix epitomized all the clichés of plasticity and impermanence associated with the new American city. In addition, like Los Angeles before it, Phoenix gathered in ambitious newcomers seeking a better life. In the 2000 census, almost a third of residents had arrived only five years or less before.

    Local entrepreneur Deb Weidenhamer, who came to the Valley of the Sun in 1970 and opened an auction business, says the rapid growth and basic openness to newcomers has created unprecedented opportunities for her. “We came with nothing,” she recalls.” We came here because it had wealth that was increasing. You can find opportunities. People come here for a new start and come with ambitions. Longevity here does not matter here. You can be here ten years and it’s like you’re an old fogy – in the east coast you’d be like a newcomer.”

    Virtually all of Weidenhamer’s employees, she notes, also come from outside the region. They create what she calls a “multiplier” effect, with each person bringing new ideas and new energies. “In San Francisco or New York you would have to compete with entrenched companies. Here you can always market the new people,” she suggested at her crowded warehouse. “There’s always a new zip code to service.”

    Much less impressed, however, have been many leading urban thinkers, including many local dignitaries. Its sprawling array of separate districts and its relatively weak downtown has led some critics, like the prominent new urbanist Andres Duany, to conclude that Phoenix is a place where “civic life has ceased to exist.” Duany, like Ralph Waldo Emerson a century earlier, hailed Boston as an example of a superior kind of community.

    Yet for America’s urban future, it is likely that Phoenix, not Boston, or even Chicago, represents the predominant form of the multi-polar flexible metropolis. Like many older metropolis, Chicago and Boston have been either losing residents — particularly middle class families — or growing slowly over the last decade. At the same time, virtually all the fastest growing cities have been places like Phoenix – chock-full of kids and thirty-somethings. That tells you something. As Pollack puts it, “People vote with their feet.”

  • A Generation Rises with Obama

    On his way to Denver, Barack Obama has been trying to mainstream his campaign. The selection of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate was intended to be a steadying force as the historic nature of his campaign as a candidate of change remains unsettling for some. But so much has been said about his status as a candidate of racial change, that his status as a candidate of generational change has been little noticed. The torch, as JFK might say, is passing to a new generation.

    Obama is the first Gen X Presidential candidate — for better and for worse.

    He’s the son of a baby boomer — his mother, Anne, was born in 1942 — and although his birth in 1961 puts him slightly ahead of the textbook mid-1960s start date of Gen X, he is the same age as the man who coined the term “Generation X,” author Douglas Coupland.

    Like many Gen Xers, Obama is a child of divorce. His anthropologist mother embodied the restless drift and countercultural curiosity of the baby boomer generation. His grandparents’ lives were more typical of the “greatest generation” — with struggles through the Great Depression and then the Second World War, followed by a more conventional, even conservative, life.

    His mother married a Kenyan; his grandparents voted for Nixon — Barack tried to bridge the divide.

    Reconciling these generational tensions has been the unwelcome responsibility of Gen X. We have been living in the wake of the Boomers all our lives. We’ve benefited from the civil rights struggles and enjoyed the opening of our culture, from rock music to the sexual revolution.

    But we’ve also experienced the fallout from their excesses — drug abuse, racial strife, fractured families, homelessness, AIDS, a decaying environment and dangerous inner cities. Gen Xers have been left to clean up after the Baby Boomers’ party, to put up with the societal growing pains, and try to reconcile the warring factions.

    Obama voiced this frustration in “The Audacity of Hope,” writing, “In the back and forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”

    His antidote is the rhetorical post-partisanship and professed belief in political pragmatism that are central to his political appeal amongst younger voters. His style of problem-solving — a cool assessment of the problems associated with predictable positions on both sides, and then an attempt to synthesize new solutions — fits Gen X perfectly.

    Jeff Gordinier, author of “X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking,” told me. “Obama’s talk about going beyond the old politics of ‘red’ and ‘blue’, liberal and conservative, and building a third way does resonate. Gen Xers tend to be pretty post-ideological, there is less allegiance to any one party or any one way of thinking. … Our political pragmatism comes as a result of growing up in the shadow of the Boomers’ idealism and seeing it fail miserably.”

    But there is another aspect of the Generation X experience Obama must overcome: They are the first American generation to come of age without a draft.

    While McCain entered military service as a young man, Obama opted for a combination of higher education and community service. At the age when McCain was a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton, Obama was at Harvard Law. To be fair, McCain is a legendary military hero because his experience was uncommon. Obama’s experience — inevitably cushy by comparison, both liberal and elite — is more common to contemporary Americans.

    But biography is at the root of what pollsters clinically call “character attributes,” and this does not help in the commander in chief test.

    Obama’s college years were full of generationally recognizable rites of passage — detailed with disarming candor in his first book, “Dreams from My Father” — smoking cigarettes and some pot and drinking beer while listening to ’70s and ’80s rock and soul. There were the confusing cross-currents of yuppie culture and multicultural identity politics — particularly resonant to a biracial student like Obama — and protests against the evils of apartheid while the evils of communism were comparatively ignored on campus. Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the civic demands of John McCain’s pre-Boomer generation experience of personal sacrifice and physical courage were largely limited to debate amongst Gen Xers.

    The generational fault lines under this campaign are rumbling right below the surface. It’s no accident that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s strength in the late Democratic primaries came overwhelmingly from older white Americans who have now begun to shift their allegiance to one of their own, John McCain. This is not just about race; it is also a generational judgment — the sense among older voters that Obama is a self-possessed smooth operator who is light on real world experience, and hasn’t earned the office.

    Obama, in turn, runs strongest among his contemporaries — voters under 50 and African-Americans. The younger the voter, the more likely they are to support Barack Obama.

    The so-called enthusiasm gap — and the pop-culture fascination with Obama — parallels other famous first-in-their-generation presidential candidates, Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton. The younger Millennial Generation’s reverence for Obama may have fueled the “celebrity” ads, but it’s because he’s made politics (briefly) cool again. With the Jay-Z “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” riff during the primary and pioneering use of YouTube and Facebook, Obama speaks the language of our contemporary culture and he looks like what’s next — the first high-tech, hip-hop president.

    After four decades and two administrations dominated by the Baby Boomer echo chamber, it’s understandable that we’d want to turn the page and get a president who has learned from their debates but is not held hostage by them.

    The promise of Obama is in transcending outdated labels and bridging old divides, but beneath that promise there is also a dash of democracy’s vanity — we like him because he is like us. As Gen X humorist Joel Stein wrote in Time magazine, “The truth is that I like Obama because he’s young, he eats arugula, and knows who Ludacris is. Because he’s the closest thing to the person I’d really like to vote for: me.”

    John P. Avlon is the author of “Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics.” He served as chief speechwriter and deputy policy director for Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This article first appeared on www.politico.com.

    © 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC

  • Hillraisers: The New Naderites?

    I don’t know about you, but I’m still pretty astonished that aging white men – especially working class, blue-collar workers – have become “Hillary voters.” Who could have predicted that? Once upon a time, Hillary was a card-carrying member of the liberal elite, a corporate lawyer who didn’t stay home to bake cookies and have teas, who ruthlessly fired travel office workers and carted off loot from the White House, who carpet-bagged her way to a Senate seat in New York, and got booed by firefighters in the wake of 9/11.

    It just goes to show how true the old cliché is: politics makes strange bedfellows. Run a young(ish) upstart black man with Harvard Law degree against Mrs. Clinton, and next thing you know she’s doing shots of whiskey with a beer chaser, eating pizza and talking about manufacturing jobs in Crown Point, Indiana – and not getting laughed out of the joint!

    A little more understandable are the die-hard Hillary women – Hillraisers – mostly older white feminists whose day had finally arrived. They rallied, they fund-raised, they phone-banked, and now they are angry! As one editorial writer put it mildly, “these women are trying to get used to the fact that a new generation is taking center stage here: one represented by Michelle Obama.” I feel ya, sisters, I really do.

    But ya’ll are flirting dangerously with becoming this election’s Naderites — that is to say, political suicide bombers. It’s not just your bras that are going to be on fire, ladies. It’s going to be planet earth. Hyperbole? Think back to the 2000 election when Naderites argued there was little difference between Bush and Gore, and even if Bush won, it would be by such a narrow margin he would have to govern from the center. Really. Think. About. That.

    I don’t hold out much hope that Obama is going to vacuum up the blue-collar vote. Nor will Obama get a plurality of the white vote; a Democrat hasn’t done that since LBJ. But the white baby-boomer’s lack of support for Obama is nothing short of shocking. Charlie Cook – hands down the best political analyst working today, and you won’t see him bloviating on The Countdown with Keith Olberman – revealed the nasty truth back in June.

    “It finally dawned on me that white Baby Boomers are the group that is really hurting Barack Obama,” Cook wrote in his National Journal column. “Of all people, the generation that brought us the Vietnam War protests and the Summer of Love is proving to be a very tough nut for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to crack.” Cook pointed out that among whites between 50 to 64, Obama is losing by a whopping 18 points, 51 percent to 33 percent. I don’t know if the numbers have moved much since June, but that was after Hillary “suspended” her campaign.

    Cook concludes, “By doing very well among African-Americans and reasonably well among Hispanics, Obama could easily overcome his deficits among whites under 50 and over 65. But losing whites born between 1944 and 1958 — pretty much the lion’s share of the Baby Boomers — by 18 percentage points? Wow. That’s a burden.”

    Obama, of course, brought some of this on by positioning himself as the post-boomer candidate, repeating the mantra that it’s “time to turn the page.” About the elections of 2000 and 2004, Obama wrote in his second book, The Audacity of Hope: “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”

    But I suspect there’s something more going on here than simply a generation gap, which Charlie Cook also hints at: “Is [Obama’s] difficulty that these are voters in their prime earnings years, when they are most sensitive to the issue of taxes?” Hmm. I wonder.

    Like politicians confirming their own worst characterizations – Bill Clinton the narcissist, Hillary the ruthless, Edwards the smarmy lawyer – boomers as a whole are living up to their worst stereotype: selfish, greedy, self-absorbed, and worse – willing to bequeath to younger generations an economic and environmental disaster of global proportions, just so long as their assets are protected.

    I can forgive the misguided Naderites who were too young to know better – hell, I’ll admit to having been one. But when it comes to boomers, age does not seem to equal wisdom. It’s like a Dennis Hopper retirement commercial writ large, as The Onion brilliantly satirized: “Retirement planning means a lot of decision making, and thank God I have the soothing presence of that amyl nitrite–huffing, obscenity-screaming, psychosexual lunatic from Blue Velvet to guide me through it.” Substitute “retirement planning” for “voting,” and that approximates how I’m starting to feel about Election 2008, thanks to the soothing presence of bra-burning, man-hating, post-menopausal ‘feminists’ to guide me through it.

    Lisa Chamberlain is the author of “Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction.” She lives in New York City.

  • Baby Boomers: A Millennial’s Perspective

    The retiring of the vast sect of the population collectively known as Baby Boomers has several economic alarms going off. Due largely to this phenomena, by the year 2030, the number of people in the U.S. age 65 and above will double in size.

    Concerns abound about whether there will be enough Social Security funds to cover retirement and what the impacts on the economy will be with this large group leaving the workforce. While these concerns are real, making an accurate assessment of the future requires going beyond analyzing demographic data by also taking into consideration cultural tendencies.

    The Baby Boomer generation covers an immense swath of the population making it difficult to generalize much about them. If one is to look at the 1960s and ‘70s, the social movements reflected an earnest attempt to manipulate the future into one where peace would be king. The optimistic spirit of the time led a small but influential group of Boomers to join communes and relinquish traditional American values altogether.

    By the time the 1980s rolled around, many Boomers had no problem reneging their oft-stated egalitarian values. Conspicuous consumption became the order of the day and newly christened Boomer parents became preoccupied with gaining an advantage over one another by vicariously living through the achievements of their young children — a notion parodied in the 1989 Ron Howard directed movie ‘Parenthood.’

    Yet, ironically, Boomers still often clung to the values and culture of their youth. Even Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs, who created a technological empire based on marketing of the idea of individuality, cites the use of the hallucinogenic drug LSD as ‘one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life.’

    So now, we have the ultimate irony. Boomers have tended to think of themselves as ‘forever young,’ either in spirit or by heading down to the local Botox clinic, but they are becoming as elderly population. Of course, many will put off the acknowledgement of aging. Often self-defined by their work, many will retire much later or not at all. In addition, with concerns about Social Security, some will continue working in order to support their accustomed lifestyle.

    Not surprisingly, real estate speculators and developers are taking aim at predicting where Baby Boomers will retire. Much has been talked about a mass ‘return to the city’ by empty nesters. The amenities that are offered by a cosmopolitan lifestyle will most likely appeal to some, but the fast-paced nature of the big city — and high prices in the most attractive urban cores — will probably keep the majority seniors out in the suburbs or moving to the countryside.

    Similarly, Boomers generally will avoid living in an ‘old-folks’ home — unless totally necessary. The idea of not being self-sufficient, even in old age, contradicts core Boomer values. Many hope, rather, that their children will reciprocate the years of generous financial support and let them live with them.

    The previous generation has shown that if indeed retirees are to move away from where they have spent the previous years of their lives, there is a propensity to go to where the climate is warm. This leads me to believe that, although both Florida and Arizona, are suffering from the mortgage crisis, these and other warm-weather states will retain their attractiveness. Indeed, the lower prices now offered could spark a resurgence of retirees in the coming years.

    But the main place for aging boomers will be precisely whey are now: the suburbs. While the suburbs are definitely not the same place characterized by Ozzie and Harriet, Baby Boomers show a preference for places where neighborhood and community are of high importance. This would partly explain why suburban college towns, even in states with dwindling real estate values, are showing strong resilience. College towns, despite their transient student populations, have a tendency to foster communities based around the functions and cultural amenities offered by a University. College towns also tend to have ‘traditional’ downtowns that remind Boomers of the kinds of places where they grew up.

    The only sure thing about the Boomers is they are a generation rife with contradictions. They can be seen as the beginning of the postmodern era, where America began the descent from its cultural apex in history. To Boomers, hard work and manufacturing was passé. Largely because their parents had come out victorious in World War II, they started in their early years to think it was party time. Even as Boomers got older and started having children, ridding themselves of platform shoes and polyester suits, they carried on some of their social values. As Boomers enter the next phase of their life, retirement, values — like a quest for independence and a search for authenticity — will continue to inform their choices.

  • Bye, Bye Boomers, Not quite

    By Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill

    They may be losing out politically to oldsters and youngins, as Morley Winograd and Michael Hais suggest, but Boomers will have a profound impact on our country’s demography and economics for decades to come.

    In some ways this is as much a matter of numbers as anything. There are lots of Boomers and until the Millennials start entering their 30s in the middle of the next decade, they will retain a massive say in what kind of places and regions will thrive.

    One thing Boomers can be counted on: to disappoint many expectations cast on them. In the 1960s the punditry was full of expectations that Boomers would reject the suburbia settled en masse by their parents. They would be different, returning to the land or resettling the urban frontier. Instead the Boomers ended up turning suburbia into the nation’s dominant geography.

    Now that the Boomers are aging, once again the punditry predicts they will once again reshape the landscape. Maybe so, but not as quickly and not in ways widely bandied in the media and some developers.

    One predominant myth is that Boomers, as they age, will desert the boring burbs and rediscover the allure of a fast-paced, defiantly “youthful” lifestyle. Suggests luxury homebuilder Robert Toll:

    We are more hip-hop and happening than our parents.
    We want the sophistication and joy and music that
    comes with city dwelling, and doesn’t come with
    sitting in the burbs watching the day go by while
    puttering, painting, reading, writing, making flies
    for fishing, customizing your own golf clubs,
    stringing your own tennis racket, tending your tropical
    fish.


    It makes good copy for journalists, and spurs wishful much thinking among urban developers. The reality is a different matter. Overall, downshifting Boomers seem to prefer what one critic calls “the bland American dream”; barely two percent want to move to experience the “excitement” of a dense urban area. And, like their younger counterparts, aging Americans have remained tethered to their cars; less than ten percent of seniors over 65 walk, bike or take public transport as their primary means of getting around. “Suburbanites,” summarizes Syracuse University economist Gary Engelhardt, “like the suburbs.”

    Indeed instead of heading to dense cities, our analysis of data — -and the findings of the homebuilding industry — is that most Boomers, as University of Arizona gerontologist Sandra Rosenbloom suggests, are “aging in place.” Rather than head off anywhere far away, most will want to stay close to their personal networks, offspring, churches or clubs.

    Family ties are perhaps the biggest factor. One quarter of Generation Xers, for example, still receive help from their parents, as do nearly a third of Millennials. As many as forty percent of Americans between 20 and 34 now live at least part-time with their parents, an option that is likely to become more commonplace in areas where home prices are particularly high.

    As a result, older Americans will remain a far more active force in the economy — and in their children’s lives — than might have been the case a generation ago. Most plan to stay near where they currently live, and rate being close to family members as a major factor in their decision. Contrary to the celebration of “independence” created by marketers and advocates of the “slimmer” family, most consider themselves to be about as concerned with passing on an inheritance to their children as their parents were.

    This does not mean that eventually some aging Boomers will not choose to move into smaller residences. But to lure them, successful communities need to develop cultural amenities and diverse stores and restaurants, while offering a secure environment. Nine of the top ten active-adult communities put up recently were located in the suburbs. “They don’t want to move to Florida and they want to stay close to the kids,” notes Washington area developer Jeff Lee. “What they are looking for is a funky suburban development — funky but safe.”

    It turns out the most attractive options for aging populations are quieter ones. Only a small slice of the aging population seeks electric excitement; at older ages, most people seek repose, familiarity and general As Canadian demographer David Foot has pointed out, as people age, they tend to favor quieter activities, such as bird watching or gardening; “eco-tourism” jaunts nearby seems more attractive than bar-hopping in the fast-paced city. This tendency will extend increasingly to non-traditional populations, including childless couples and the gay community, many of whose members also apparently share the general desire for a quieter life as they age.

    Indeed, if you are looking for a big movement among aging Boomers — now roughly 55 to 64 — the best place to look will be amenity-rich smaller towns and cities such as Douglas County, Colorado and certain counties in Idaho, in the Berkshires of New England, and even in parts of Alaska. Such counties, according to the US Department of Agriculture, grew ten times faster than other rural counties.

    In many of these counties’ central towns, old Main Streets are already being restored; as downshifting seniors move in, this process should accelerate rapidly. College towns in particular could win out — something they will need to do as the number of teenagers begins to drop dramatically in the next decade.

    Although not in ways foreseen by urban boosters, the Boomers still could have a major impact on our future communities. In many places, they could become a bulwark of community organizations and churches. They certainly will have more time to devote themselves to quality of life issues, including environmental activism, education and historic preservation.

    And as many may still be working, they could contribute to economic growth, through their greater financial resources and accumulated skills. Expect many Boomers to work well into the 60s and 70s — using their spare bedrooms to accommodate home offices and assisting younger entrepreneurs develop their businesses. Many will keep working because they need the money; others may still in the game for the love of it.

    In the end the Boomers could play a less heroic, but still very positive role in the evolution of American communities. Even as the Millennials mature into dominance — and the Xers assert their shot at political leadership — the Boomers could offer the financial wherewithal, the skill and, perhaps, most surprising of all, the wisdom required by a rapidly evolving, and expanding, society.

  • Bye Bye Boomers

    By Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais

    The formal ratification of the outcome of the primary elections at the party’s national conventions marks more than just the beginning of a new era in American politics. It signals the demise of Boomer generation attitudes and beliefs as the dominant motif in American life.

    After 16 years of Baby Boomer presidents, first Bill Clinton and then George W. Bush, primary voters in both parties rejected quintessential Boomer ideologues (Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee) in favor of candidates who were explicitly opposed to Boomer-style politics. Although Barack Obama is chronologically a very young Boomer, he signaled, in a March 2007 Selma, Alabama speech, his desire to break with the divisive politics of an earlier, “Moses” generation. Instead he embraced the beliefs of this century’s “Joshua” generation, Millennials, born between 1982 and 2003. For his part, John McCain is a member of the older Silent Generation, born between 1925 and 1945 and has constantly exhibited that generation’s style, positioning himself as a political maverick who attempts to bridge ideological gaps to achieve larger goals.

    But the big break is with the Boomer generation. Unlike Boomers, Millennials have been raised to play nice with each other and find win-win solutions to any problem. Boomer (and Generation X) parents sat toddler Millennials in front of the television set to watch “Barney” and absorb each episode’s lesson of self-esteem and mutual respect (even as they bolted from the room, sick from the sweetness of it all). With the show’s “my friend is your friend and your friend is my friend” lyrics hard wired into their psyche, Millennials have a strong desire to share everything they do with everyone else.

    The arrival of social network technologies enabled Millennials to create the most intense, group-oriented decision-making process of any generation in American history. This generation’s need to make sure the outcome of both minor decisions, like where to hang out, and major decisions, such as whether go to war, reflects both a penchant for consensus and team work which will become the future benchmarks for American political life.

    In contrast Senator Clinton made a definitive—if sometimes a bit too strenuous—case for a Boomer style of leadership in her primary campaign, emphasizing the value of her experience and wisdom. Governors Huckabee and Romney’s approach, for their part, stridently insisted upon the need to preserve the superior set of traditional values .

    Now it’s time to encourage the Boomers to take their well-deserved retirement, and offer the opportunity for newer, Gen X leaders and their values. This may be difficult for many Xers, who will need to overcome their own lack of understanding of, and in some cases outright disdain for, the youngest generation. Humorists Steven Colbert and John Stewart, both quintessential Gen Xers, recently demonstrated their risk-taking mindset by mocking Millennial attitudes as demonstrated by Senator Obama’s rock star reception in Berlin. The failure of their Millennial audience to laugh at the joke, or buy into Senator McCain’s attempt to suggest it somehow made Obama less qualified to be President, demonstrates the challenge the Millennial zeitgeist will pose for those seeking to become the nation’s leaders.

    The change from Boomer to Millennial style is already becoming evident in other areas of American life as well. At the 1968 Olympics, as the Boomer inspired, idealist era began, African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the gold and bronze medalists in the men’s 200-meter race, raised a black-gloved fist in a protest for black power as the Star Spangled Banner was played to celebrate their victories. Forty years later, Jason Lezak, captured the values of the new Millennial era as he explained how he was able to swim the fastest 400-meter freestyle leg in history to bring gold to his teammates. “It’s the Olympics and I’m here for the USA . . . .I got a supercharge and took it from there. It was unreal.” Lezak was joined at the award ceremony by his Millennial teammate, Cullen Jones, only the second African-American to ever win a gold medal in swimming. In sharp contrast to Smith and Carlos forty years earlier, Jones happily celebrated the victory of his team and country.

    Ultimately the 2008 election will turn on which candidate can bring these new attitudes and beliefs to bear on the number one issue facing the country—the economy. Unlike Boomers, whose focus was on economic growth to support their workaholic personalities, Millennials are more concerned about economic inequality and believe government has a key role to play in bringing about a greater degree of economic fairness. Almost 70 percent of Millennials express a preference for “a bigger government that provides more services,” compared to only 43 percent of older generations who agreed with that statement.

    Connecting the current sorry state of the American economy and its dependence on foreign oil with the other favorite concern of Millennials, global warming, is an even better way to win this generation’s support on economic issues. Whoever is elected this year will need to reshape America’s economy in line with Millennial expectations of inclusiveness and fairness as dramatically as FDR’s New Deal created a new economic framework for the Millennial’s generational forbearers, the GI Generation.

    The Broadway musical, “Bye Bye Birdie,” captured the end of the conventional era of the ‘50s, as the onslaught of Rock n’ Roll pitted child against parent and ushered in an age that celebrated rebellion in all its forms. The confrontations between Boomer “Meathead” (Michael Stivic) on “All in the Family,” with his tradition bound father-in-law, Archie Bunker, captured his generation’s desire to overturn the establishment using the power of ideas to persuade the recalcitrant of the error of their ways.

    Now it’s time to realize new values are ascending. Millennials generally get along great with their parents and celebrate the wholesome values of “High School Musical,” where boys and girls of all types come together to defeat those that seek to win only for their own personal ambition. Those nominated in the next two weeks at their party’s convention should heed this lesson. To gain the presidency, the winning ticket will have to appeal to the Millennial sense of pride and teamwork in meeting the challenges the country faces.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics published by Rutgers University Press.